


Monsters Inside My Head

by Blue_Savannah



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, F/M, Modern Era, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-09-15 11:21:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16932339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Savannah/pseuds/Blue_Savannah
Summary: Modern AU in which Rey is able to discern people's fates merely by touching them.———-Her gaze flickers towards Kylo’s, and she reaches out to shake his hand. At first, she only registers the warmth of his bare hand, but his touch lingers in her skin like the buzz of a tattoo needle, sinking into her consciousness.The picture blooms behind her eyes like a rabid sickness. Every nerve in her body lights up, her neurons popping and tensing and singing. Rey was in a car accident as a kid, and this feels just like that — like the way the breath had pulsed unwillingly from her lungs in the moment of impact, like how the glass had floated all around her in a giant shrapnel cloud of distorted light.





	1. Chapter 1

When Rey Kenobi is an infant, cooing, swaddled in pink and with tiny bows nestled in her slicked back strands of dark hair, she starts seeing kaleidoscopic flashes of images whenever people touch her. 

Of course, as an infant, she doesn’t know how to articulate the things she sees. That comes later.

 _Later_ , as in, she’s four years old, plucking at her dad’s sleeve, asking, “Daddy, why is the bad man shooting mommy?”

Rey’s father, Jude Kenobi, is infatuated with Rey’s mother, a dark-eyed vivacious beauty. The two of them got married young — firstly because that’s what people do in small towns, and especially on reservation towns where it’s so fucking freezing nine months out of the year that the only things left to do indoors are fuck and drink — and secondly because Rey’s father fell hard for Rey’s mother, the way that people almost never fall in real life: an Icarus burning up, crashing down to earth kind of fall.

Sharon Kenobi is wasted on Browning, Montana. She belongs onstage somewhere, pouting under an expanse of lights bright enough to eat away any audience. Her bare skin is the natural kind of clear and soft that women will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to replicate; underneath the barest smudging of mascara, her eyes are huge and long-lashed. No talent scouts bother coming here to tell young girls that they have the makings of stardom, but if they did, Sharon would be the one they’d all pick. 

As mothers go, Sharon is mostly loving, but also selfish, the way beautiful people tend to be. She rarely cuddles with Rey, though when she does, the skin-to-skin contact elicits an image in Rey’s mind. When Rey touches her mother, she sees a sad-faced man, his chin stubbled with lethargy, his mouth a broken slash, the gun a silver accessory in his hands. It shakes when he shoots it, sending the first bullet ricocheting around the tiny kitchen. The second bullet hits Rey’s mother in the collarbone. A red, misshapen flower blooms just under her neckline. The third bullet hits her in the hip, the fourth, in the chest. 

(Later, after the incident, the kitchen floor will be so sticky with bloody residue that even ammonia won’t bleach out the stain. Rey’s father will sell the house and give Rey to his half sister to raise, but that doesn’t come until later). 

When Rey touches her father, she sees a different picture. It’s nightfall, a single slash of red ribboning the horizon like a spill of blood. Rey’s father is lying in a bed, his hair a shock of grey, his hands, two papered skeletons resting atop the covers. A woman who is not Rey’s mother is standing beside him and weeping, while he coughs out two rattling, phlegmy breaths. 

And then — he simply exhales a sad gust of air, and is gone.

———-

Rey’s best friend, Rose Tico, is the one to convince her to try something new. Rey has been miserable for so long that she has forgotten what it feels like to _not_ despise her job, and so she interviews at Rose’s office out of sheer desperation alone.

They make her an offer within two hours. 

A week and a half later, Rey scribbles out the necessary information in her W9 form, marking the minimum tax deductions and signing where the paper says _sign_. Across the table, Amilyn Holdo, of HR, watches her with opaque eyes. She’s wearing an immaculately cut, dark green jumpsuit with kitten heels and iridescent gold hoops stabbed through the cartilage of her ears. Rey’s wearing one of her best dresses, a black A-line situation that flares out from her hips. It pales in comparison to Amilyn’s couture, but Rey isn’t intimidated, both because growing up with Sharon taught her not to be afraid of beautiful women, but also — and mainly — because when you’re able to see how people die, nothing much really scares you after that.

Rey shook Amilyn's hand on her way into the office, and so she has already seen that Amilyn will die in a hospital bed many years from now, surrounded by a bevy of weeping family members. _Cancer_. 

Amilyn’s fate isn’t so bad. Everyone goes, eventually, and the luckiest are those who die in their beds when they’re old, mourned by the children they leave behind. The bad ones are the ones that go violently. Rey’s been an unhappy witness to more stabbings and shootings than she’d ever wish on her worst enemy. She’s never tried to stop any of the deaths, only internalized them into weird, fragmented nightmares that drag her down into places so deep and dark, she wakes up thinking she’s already dead. 

She’s never told anyone either. Who would believe her? _Hi, my name’s Rey Kenobi, and when you touch me, I’ll get to see how you die, whether I want to or not. Nice to meet you!_

Amilyn gives her a tour of the office. Rey’s introduced to a cycle of blonde women, almost indistinguishable from one another with their jagged blonde bangs and high waisted jeans. Finn, from the digital team, smiles at her with blue lined eyes. Maz Kanata, petite, with bobbed black hair and hipster glasses, is her seatmate. Amilyn supplies Rey with a tape gun, stapler and notebook, before sashaying away precariously.

“Where are you from?” Maz asks. 

“Oh. Uh. Montana,” Rey says warily. 

The girls grouped around the pod of desks giggle over that. It’s something different to dissect, at least. “What’s it like there?”

Rey doesn’t tell them that she lived the first seven years of her life on a reservation. She doesn’t tell them that her mother was murdered, or that her father gave her away immediately following. She doesn’t tell them that in the wintertime, it’s so bitterly, intensely cold, it hurts to even suck in air through your lungs. Temperatures plummet to twenty or thirty degrees below, and clouds of exhaust from idling cars settle on the roads to form slick glazes. Vehicles glide through stop signs like they’re driving through a slip n’ slide. In such an environment, Rey’s aunt used to keep her water faucets running to prevent freezing, and aimed her space heaters at the pipes. Rey wore long underwear to work and to school. Nighttime bled out a blanket of silence, a sort of strangled, breathless quiet. Outside Rey’s window, the moon was tiny in the expanse of sky. Even pitch black, the sky swallowed up the landscape: vast and white and wild and endless. You could drive for hours through Montana and see nothing but that huge, hovering sky over you the entire time. Sometimes, when Rey closed her eyes, it was even big enough to blot out the imminent deaths of everyone she’d ever touched.

“Cold,” Rey says finally, realizing everyone is watching her. “Montana is cold.”

———-

Kylo Ren’s phone chimes unhappily when he stalks into the building, already fifteen minutes for his meeting. The text is from an unlisted number, and it says, _Can we talk?_

Kylo writes back, _fuck off_. 

The elevator jolts upwards, stopping on the fifth floor. Two men in suits get on, both nursing to-go cups of coffee, glancing over at him in quick acknowledgement. Kylo sighs gustily, looking up at the mirrored ceiling of the elevator. His reflection sighs back at him, the red-purple bruise on the side of his neck ugly and raw. 

He gets off on the ninth floor and runs straight into Amilyn, standing at the receptionist’s desk and snarling into the phone about some lost breakfast pastries. Her entire demeanor changes as soon as she sees him. In under a second, she snaps the phone shut and buries all the petty, black, angry things somewhere deep inside of her, lacquering everything over with a bright smile and pretty eyes. Actually most people are like that. Kylo’s one of the few to wear his flaws openly, like armor against the world. He wears everything too close to the surface, meaning that when life rubs up against him, it leaves fingerprint-sized spaces of raw skin behind. 

“I have a girlfriend Amilyn,” he reminds her testily, as she matches him stride for stride on his way to the conference room. “And I’m late for a meeting.”

“Jesus, it’s just a Christmas party, Kylo. I was only asking you to be nice.” Moisture glitters in Amilyn’s eyes as she spins away, but Kylo is unmoved. The basic reality of who he is means that women have chased him ever since he was a teenager. At first, as a sixteen year old boy, it was flattering; now it is tedious. 

Kylo doesn’t really like people. His psychiatrist calls it _misanthropy_ , and as much as Kylo would like to blame his painful childhood, there are lots of children with crappy parents who still grow up to be good, kind adults. Just not him, apparently.

———-

The meeting is mostly a waste of his time, more clients looking to conceptualize a creative campaign that will kickstart the launch of next year’s product line. They want four ideas within the hour.

Instead of writing everything up, Kylo stands outside the building and blows smoke rings into space. He hates time constraints. They remind him of his estranged father, Han, fiddling with airplane controls, ferrying passengers across time and space to exotic destinations like Japan and Indonesia and Australia — and of his mother, Leia, bound to the schedule with which her PA presented her every morning. As a kid, he used to watch her on _Entertainment Tonight_ , twirling on the red carpet in a froth of cotton candy dresses, her smile bright enough to cut through the camera flashes. She never smiled that way at home. At home, she’d sit close-mouthed in front of her vanity and apply careful amounts of anti-aging serum, or pore over movie scripts for hours. Kylo used to Sharpie pictures onto the wood floor, just to see if she would notice. How fitting, that his love for art was borne out of an initial desire to rebel. At its core, art _is_ an act of rebellion — a big _fuck you_ to the world that attempts to compartmentalize people into neat, containable boxes of X and Y. People aren’t like that and neither is art. Art is blurry, messy, quantum and slippery, limited only by human perceptions. Art says _anything is possible_ , and makes you promise to believe it. _So, you want a green sky? So paint it._

Kylo sucks in another lungful of smoke, and tips his head upwards. Today’s sky is less blue and more an iced over shade of grey. A long time ago, there didn’t used to be a word to describe the color blue. In _The Iliad_ , Homer described the sea as “wine-dark,” viewing it as a subsidiary of another color, glossing over hue to focus on emotionality. The first color words to appear were black and white, which make sense, since people see the world as a study in contrasts. After black and white came red, the color of violence. Blue was the last color to be named, following yellow and green.

“Got a light?”

Kylo’s head jerks up, roused from his musings of color. A girl is standing in front of him, her cigarette outstretched, a small offering. A smattering of freckles dot her nose like smears of cinnamon. Her brown hair is flecked with streaks of red, pulled back into a strange organization of buns and braids. But her eyes are alive, supercharged with fire, as bright and clear as glass. His first reaction is to remember those eyes, to memorize how they seem to hold the whole sky, so that he can draw them later. His second reaction is annoyance. 

“No,” he says shortly.

The girls shrugs, careless. “OK, no worries.”

Kylo glances sidelong at her. She’s just standing next to him, apparently drinking in the profile of city life, staring at a construction site across the road. A drill roars to life, momentarily drowning out the sound of honking cars and pedestrians screeching at each other. Kylo looks downwards, to his feet. There’s an empty tequila bottle and a discarded condom rolling around in the gutter. _Nature_.

The girl is still standing there. He can’t just ignore it. “What are you doing?”

She turns, eyebrow raised. It’s freezing out, hovering near twenty degrees, but she’s wearing her coat open and loose, with no scarf. Chin down, her skin is bare to just above her breasts, revealing collarbones sharp enough to cut something. “I just needed a breath of fresh air. I wasn’t aware you owned the sidewalk.”

Kylo ignores the jab. “Aren’t you cold?”

“No. I know cold. This isn’t cold.”

The way she says it inflames his curiosity. At surface level, it tells him she’s from somewhere cold, so naturally, his follow up question should be, _where are you from?_ But what he really hears is the mystery underneath her words. He hears, _I know things; I’ve seen things_ , and suddenly, he wants desperately to know _what things_. It unsettles him, but then, maybe his psychiatrist would be happy to hear that he’s at least taking an interest in another person. In addition to calling Kylo a _misanthropist_ , his psychiatrist says he is _asocial_. This normally occurs when someone is unable to pick up on standard social cues, but while Kylo _can_ pick up on them, he just doesn’t give a fuck. 

Kylo resents this nameless girl for piquing his curiosity. He doesn’t want anyone to pick apart the sad stitching of his life. He’s very happy with his current relationship because, as a model, Tallie spends most of her time traveling and sashaying down runways. She’s too preoccupied with herself to ever probe into his emotions. 

“Chatty, aren’t you?” The girl’s face is cocked towards his, her eyes diamantine in a sudden spray of weak winter sunlight. “It’s my first day at a new job,” she explains in a rush of words, like she needs to explain herself, “I figured you probably work in the building too. I just thought I’d introduce myself.”

Kylo snarls, “You thought wrong,” and then he stomps back into the building, trailing slush in his wake, causing the doorman to scowl heavily at him.

———-

“So,” Rose leans over Rey’s desk, arms splayed and dark eyes bright with curiosity, “How’s your first day going?”

Rey stretches away from her computer desk. She’s just had an interesting interaction with an editor she met at her former job who’s (maybe?) tried to ask her out via email. “Good. Fine.” She flicks the bobblehead on her desk with her fingernail, watching as Jon Snow nods approvingly at her. 

“You meet everyone yet?”

Rey scans the area. “I dunno. Just people in my pod I think.”

“Come on,” Rose hooks her friend up by one arm, “you probably haven’t met Kylo. He’s the Executive Creative Director here, and he’s completely crazy. Crazy, but brilliant. He’s the one responsible for conceptualizing half of the campaigns in the office. I think I saw him stomping around here earlier.”

Rey allows herself to be dragged forwards reluctantly. She likes this office space. She appreciates the broad expanse of windows and open arrangement of desks. At her old job, everyone had the same cubic centimeters of space. Here, chairs are sprawled out, papers thrown casually into piles, sticky notes and posters decorate the walls like bright flowers amidst a sea of technology. 

“Excuse me, Kylo,” Rose says, coming to a halt in front of an enormous desk pushed against the side of the far wall. There’s a tremor in her voice that wasn’t present before, lengthening her syllables. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to introduce you to our newest manager. This is my friend, Rey.”

Rey looks up, into the blackest eyes she’s ever seen, watches as they crystallize into recognition. 

“You,” the man from outside says. His voice is deep and languid, like she remembers. Just as before, the sheer presence of him almost overwhelms Rey. She thinks that few people are truly alive; most everyone just exists. But this man — Kylo, she mentally names him — crackles with energy. It’s why she’d chosen to stand next to him while outside on her lunch break. Over six million people in Manhattan, but this one burnt so hot, the air around him smelled like iron. 

“Oh,” Rose’s gaze ping pongs between them, from one to the other. “You guys already know each other?”

“We had a brief conversation,” Kylo’s smile is terse, ending at the corners of his mouth without ever traveling up to his eyes, “Welcome to the company Rey.”

He holds out his hand, and Rey stares at his bare skin like it’s something dangerous. _Oh god_ , she thinks, _I don’t want to see it. Not … him_. But there’s nothing for it. He’s staring at her, his expression shifting dangerously, the edges of his gaze pricking at her like sharp glass, and now Rose is staring too, mouthing, _Rey!_

Rey grits her teeth. Her gaze flickers towards Kylo’s, and she reaches out to shake his hand. At first, she only registers the warmth of his bare hand, but his touch lingers in her skin like the buzz of a tattoo needle, sinking into her consciousness.

The picture blooms behind her eyes like a rabid sickness. Every nerve in her body lights up, a billboard blaze in Times Square. Rey was in a car accident as a kid, and this feels just like that — like the way the breath had pulsed unwillingly from her lungs in the moment of impact, like how the glass had floated all around her in a giant shrapnel cloud of distorted light.

“Oh my god,” she says aloud, and that’s what brings her back to self, the way her words puncture through the sudden stillness. She opens her eyes and she’s on her knees in the office, her skin smarting with sudden rug burn, her hands shaking uncontrollably. Rose and Kylo are both shouting things, but she can’t discern words. A buzz of noise floats around her like a cloud.

“Rey?” Rose is asking, her voice pitched unnaturally high. “Rey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“I —” Rey tries. She swallows down her spit and tries again. “I’m sorry. I think I fainted.”

“You need some water.” Kylo is looking at her strangely again, his eyes black and unfathomable. Energy pulses between them, an invisible current. Rey wants desperately to touch him and is simultaneously terrified of ever touching him again.

_How to tell him what she’d seen?_


	2. Chapter 2

There is an anecdotal belief held by Americans that if you dig a hole deep enough, you’ll eventually reach China. This is possible in theory — but if you dig straight down through the center of the earth from anywhere in the contiguous 48 United States, you will emerge somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

There are only two U.S. states antipodal with land.

Montana is one of them.

As a kid, Rey was intrigued by the concept of antipodes. She grew up sad and lonely, one of many unfortunate side effects having to do with being able to foresee death, and she was obsessed with the idea of escape. She liked looking at maps and tracing faraway sites with her fingertips, lingering over places that intrigued her, like the forest of knives, in Madagascar, or the island of Taha’a, in French Polynesia. On a map, Montana’s opposite world point is the Kerguelen Islands. Situated somewhere in the Antarctic, the islands live 2,000 miles away from civilization. Scientists call them _the desolation islands_ because of their frigid, windy landscape and incredibly remote location. 

_All the way on the opposite side of the world_ , Rey used to think, _and just as lonely_.

This is what she did to get out of Montana, _she wrote things_. While her classmates were making meth in basements or skiving off school to go hunting and fishing, she was writing. Poems, shitty stories, words scribbled on the backs of napkins — it didn’t matter, as long as she was stringing together sentences that made sense of the aching void in her chest. Words, Rey discovered, were a powerful means of escape. And so she wrote wild, rabid prose about death, and bleak, sad articulation of loneliness, and violent, jagged, spiky fragments on desire, and when she was seventeen years old, she got a scholarship to UM.

Rey majored in journalism, waitressed nights in Missoula to save money and graduated in three years. She’d never left the state until the day she moved to New York City, but she never looked back. In Montana, she left behind an indifferent aunt, a dead mother, a father who didn’t want her, and a sky big enough to swallow her whole. 

Those first few black months in New York City, Rey lived month to month in truly shit apartments in Brooklyn Heights, before finally landing her first real job on a fluke, a public relations internship that spawned a full time position and a thirty five thousand dollar yearly salary — more money than she’d ever seen before in her life.

But that was then, and this is now, three years later, and she’s still working in PR, still stuck, still dreaming about words.

———

“I just think we’re going down different paths,” Tallie is saying, the lips of her fuck-me mouth moving in strange ways. She ubered over to Kylo’s apartment fresh from a fashion shoot, and her golden hair is still teased into ‘80s ringlets, her cornflower-blue eyes almost indistinguishable under a smoky layer of eyeshadow. The black dress she’s wearing cleaves to her body like a knife. “I’m sorry, Kylo. I’ll always care about you. I hope you can understand.”

“I do understand,” Kylo replies, quietly absolving her of any guilt. He is not sad, not exactly. There are varying degrees of sadness, and this is a specifically niche emotion: loneliness and despair and anguish and confusion boiled down and distilled into one awfully potent concoction. While he doesn’t love Tallie, being with her anchors him to some semblance of normalcy. Left alone for too long, Kylo resorts to his baser instincts, delving slowly back into the tortured artist persona that he’s worked so hard to leave behind. 

It’s one of the reasons he entered into corporate life. He himself is not a corporate personality, but something about working under bright lights in an office space and being held accountable by teams of stable people soothes the edges of rawness in him. Kylo thinks he scares most of the people in the office. He’s an HR nightmare, though his unprofessional demeanor is accepted on the basis that his creativity is somehow invariably linked with instability. People assume that about artists in general. Take Amy Winehouse’s biopic, for example — _Jules, this is so boring without drugs_. Or Van Gogh, with his mutilated ear, painting _Starry Night_ from the window of an asylum in France. Or Sylvia Plath, crawling underneath her house, with her stomach full of pills. 

Tallie kisses him gently on the cheek. “Thank you for being a gentleman about this,” she says, as if she fully expected the breakup to bring out his uglier side.

Kylo watches her leave. He stands at the window as she teeters in her high heels on the pavement below him, and in his mind he doesn’t see Tallie anymore, but his mother — draped in Versace, reeking of Chanel, off to another premiere event, leaving behind a little boy with his nose pressed to the window. 

When her car drives off, Kylo crosses the room in angry strides. He takes his palette knife from the drawer and some empty canvas from behind the table. This is what he paints: the drizzle of sad, blue rain falling down a frosted window. A black shape hovers blurrily behind the mist of translucent glass, a bubble of breath the only smear of white on the canvas. 

With his knife, Kylo angrily blends black and blue into a blocky bruise of color. He titles it, _Left Behind_.

———

Rey has a fairly good, uneventful first two months at her new job. The work is interesting enough, albeit predictable, but she tries to take comfort in the stability it offers. She does a little bit of bartending on the side, and some part-time copywriting work, just to help her pay rent.

December ices over into January, draping the world in glittering shards of smashed up slush. The sky is black; the world is white. In the mornings, during her hour commute from Brooklyn, Rey stands between a sea of Canada Goose jackets and thinks about her next step in life. For her, growing up in Montana, it was all about getting out. After that came the brutal determination to make money and take care of herself. Desperation outlined a simple dichotomy between eating and starving. True need makes everything clear, while problems don’t often enter our heads until we have the luxury of choices that confuse us. 

Now, even as Rey wants to leave the PR field entirely and pursue her writing, she continues to trudge into an office and cobble together media lists for campaigns she doesn’t care about. Partly, she stays out of fear — because fear of dying by boredom is still better than the fear of the unknown, but also because she doesn’t want to start a new career from scratch all over again. Rey’s first few months of living in Manhattan are a haze of fogged-over memories, of eking out a meager existence in the shittiest slivers of space possible, of crouching down to wash her hair in showers that could barely accommodate her body, of nights where she laid wide awake listening to rats scrabble in the walls.

She can’t return to that. She won’t go back.

———

One Thursday evening in late January, Rey is in a good mood. She has a date — a friend of Rose’s named Poe, and he’s sent Rey several thoughtful, funny messages that leave her feeling … hopeful. Emotion buoys her throughout the day. She caps off her happy feelings with a smear of dark red lipstick and gold highlighter dabbed messily across her cheekbones before leaving the office. Outside, the night is gilded with moisture, so thick and wet, it feels like you could wring it from the air.

She doesn’t get ten feet before someone bumps into her. His bare hand brushes against hers, an accidental skin contact, but the shock of it slams into Rey like a stormfront. One second, she’s light as air, gliding through the night — the next, she’s shaking, suddenly cold as ice, her heart thundering in her ears, a white fog behind her eyes. 

_Oh god_. 

This nameless man will die in utter agony. His final moments play out in Rey’s head in horrifying HD: the way he crumples down on broken legs like a marionette puppet with broken strings, the fountain spray of blood from the knife wound in his stomach, the way he will grasp at the peeling, ragged skin, like he can somehow piece it back together, the way he will beg for death long minutes before it is finally granted.

All this, and the stranger is gone before Rey can even open her mouth, just another shadowed figure disappearing into the anonymity of a big city. The horror of his torturous death drives her to her knees, and now Rey feels like she is the one dying, and she is cold with fear, she is so fucking cold from the inside out. 

She’s seen brutal deaths before, of course. But she hasn’t had anything jar her in awhile, not since —

“Rey?”

She looks up, straight into black eyes wreathed in spirals of smoke.

“Are you alright?”

“Kylo.” She tries to play it off with a laugh, but she’s too shaken and it comes out as a broken, rattling gasp. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. You keep catching me at inopportune moments.”

His expression is inscrutable, but that weird, pulsing energy is back, throbbing between the two of them like an open wound. When he makes a move to help her to her feet, Rey recoils so violently that she hits her head on the back of one of the building pillars. She doesn’t want anyone to touch her. The thought of inadvertently seeing more violence is unfathomable in her current fragile state.

Kylo stubs out his cigarette with the heel of his boot. His expression doesn’t soften, exactly; it just changes. Black as they are, his eyes are full of emotion. “When you’re ready then,” he says, and his voice is gritty.

Rey puts a hand to the back of her head. Her fingertips come away lightly flecked with a smear of blood. “I’m fine,” she says dully, mist swirling around her. _Smile, you stupid girl_ , she thinks to herself, because women are taught to smile, because smiling means that men are less likely to hurt them. Hadn’t she learned that on the reservation? In such a remote, end-of-the-world place as Montana, people feel like they can get away with anything, and sometimes they do. Tribal courts in the federally recognized Native American tribes across the country do not have jurisdiction over non-Indian perpetrators. This means that when non-native tourist men came into Browning (which wasn’t often), Rey would avoid them, and if she couldn’t do that, she _smiled_ — because a smiling woman is a non-threatening one. 

“You’re absolutely _not_ fine,” Kylo snaps, in a tone that brooks zero argument. “Would you please let me help you?”

Rey allows him to support her as she clambors awkwardly to her feet. 

“Come on.” Taking her gloved arm, Kylo walks with her back into the building, and the gesture is so sweetly modest that it softens her. 

“This is embarrassing,” she tries to recover, “my fainting spells, I mean. You must think I’m so weak.”

Kylo presses the call button to the elevator. “I don’t, actually,” he tells her, “I think you’re hiding something.”

The door pings. 

Rey smiles, because she doesn’t know what else to do with her face. “What? No. My doctor says I’m highly anemic. I get these dizzy spells that come on me unexpectedly when I don’t eat enough and …”

“Bullshit.” Walking into the elevator, Kylo gestures that she should follow. “I saw you outside. You were totally fine, and then that man bumped into you, and you were absolutely _not_ fine. Just like with me. You were fine until you shook my hand, and then you were on the floor. Something happens to you with skin-to-skin contact, doesn’t it? What is it? Do you _feel_ something? See something?”

As far away from Kylo as possible, wedged up against the opposite wall of the elevator, Rey only stares at him. People have commented before that she’s a bit strange. Rey thinks that her dad probably suspected what she can do, but he handed her off to his sister rather than attempt to get to know his only daughter. Growing up, she was teased in school. With her big eyes and her mess of braids, kids used to laugh at her for being so quiet, but how was she to speak? At eight years old, she knew how all her classmates would die. Some violently, some peacefully, all a kaleidoscopic collage of death inside her head that never went away. 

No one’s ever asked her about herself so directly before. 

“You see something, don’t you?” Kylo presses. The door to the elevator opens, but neither of them make a move, locked in the force field of each other’s gazes. “You saw something when you touched me. Felt something. What was it?”

 _Your last moments_ , Rey wants so badly to say, but doesn’t. For some strange reason, she thinks Kylo might understand. There is a sort of wildness to his face that reminds her of the violently changing weather patterns way up in the mountains, in Glacier National Park. Warmth is only an illusion there. The world might be dappled with light, the sun a hot arc on your shoulders, but the snow can still come in an instant, falling sideways as wind-driven slush. Violence, lying so near to the surface, so closely intertwined with beauty.

The words rise from Rey’s stomach, float up into her throat and die, stillborn, on her lips. _I saw you, Kylo. I saw you on your knees, a gun to your head. And your last words on this earth were my name. Rey, you said. You breathed it, like a prayer, like my name was the most beautiful name in the world. I’ve never heard anyone say my name like that before, in my entire life. And then you closed your eyes, and the gun exploded and the world was just a bloody, jagged collection of the color red._

Rey exhales. “I can’t tell you,” she says finally.

_Why did you say my name like that? What do I mean to you?_

Kylo holds open the elevator doors for her. “Fine. Come with me.”

———

In art class, Kylo learned to look at people and things as they appear. In life, humans categorize to create shortcuts — our brains identify _computer, desk, chair_. We don’t see the splay of light on the desk, the wood chipping at the corner, the initials someone has carved into the corner. We don’t _see_ it as it really is; instead, we _classify_ it.

Kylo makes an effort to look at Rey as she appears now. Spray of cinnamon freckles across her nose. Dark hair, flecked with colors of gold and brown and almost-auburn, pulled back into a series of complicated-looking braids. High cheekbones. Dark eyes, clear like glass. Looking straight into them is disarming in the same way that looking into a mirror and seeing the imperfections of your own face is jarring. 

“Here,” he tells her, pushing a frosted glass across the counter, “have a drink with me.”

They’re sitting together in what has affectionately been dubbed ‘the world’s smallest bar.’ Because of all the company’s alcohol clients, the office has accumulated a vast amount of rum and vodka and tequila. Two years ago, they refurbished one of the giant coat closets, knocking out the shelving and hangers. They put in a slab of wood, threw on a granite countertop, painted the walls red and stashed all the alcohol there. It’s barely big enough for the two of them, but it’s where Kylo has taken Rey now. 

He watches the pulse in her throat jump as she takes a long swallow of the rum he’s just poured for her. 

“Would you tell me about yourself?” he asks, as gently as he’s able. 

Rey curls her fingernails into her palms, immediately on guard. “What do you want to know?”

Kylo looks at her and sees an animal underneath her now smoothly imperceptible face, hackles raised, fur on edge, ready to run. He doesn’t want to scare her away. “Whatever you feel comfortable telling me.”

Rey’s eyebrows contract, slightly. “I’m from Montana.”

Kylo remembers the first time he’d ever seen her, standing outside the building, before he’d known she worked here. _I know cold; this isn’t cold_. He remembers how open and friendly she’d been, how unforgivably rude he’d been in return. It was one of his worst defensive mechanisms. Unconsciously, whenever he saw a girl that immediately piqued his interest, he pushed her away. It had nothing to do with beauty. Tallie had been beautiful, but she hadn’t interested him this way. With her smooth, languid body, her limpid blue eyes and pillow-cloud lips, he’d only wanted her one way. He barely knew anything about Rey and yet he already knew — she was the kind of girl who crawled underneath your skin, slit open your veins and nestled inside like a poison, making you want her in all kinds of dangerous ways. 

“And what was that like?” Kylo follows up.

Rey takes another swallow of the rum. “Look, I’m so sorry, but I actually have plans tonight. I have somewhere I’m supposed to be now.”

Any normal, social-cue reading person would immediately allow her to leave. And normally Kylo would too — but he doesn’t know what comes over him in this instant. Instead of standing up and escorting her out, he reaches out and presses his fingernails to the cool, open skin of her wrist, watching as her pupils dilate with some nameless emotion. Her lips part, exhaling a swath of air. “Please don’t go,” he says. He thinks of the painting in his bedroom, of the blue rain patterning the glass, of the dark, motionless shape behind the window.

_Don't leave me. Stay with me, just for a little while, at least._


	3. Chapter 3

_Raindrops falling like bullets. The jagged zigzag of a slick, tarmac road. Headlights arcing through the night like twin spears. The world draped in the sleek, icy sheet of winter._

_The car hits a patch of ice, swerving out of control. Thunder rattles in the ears of the driver, slower and deeper than his pulse. Adrenaline crackles underneath his skin. He looks up, through the delicately snow-veiled windshield, straight into the oncoming lights of an eighteen wheeler._

_“I love you,” he tells the only passenger — his brother — and then the ensuing collision is shattering the night like a firework display of grotesque proportions, bright blood painting the windshield in a spray of color._

That first time seeing Poe Dameron’s death had left Rey momentarily speechless. They’d been eating dinner together, a rescheduled event after she’d cancelled their first blind date as a result of Kylo. (That’s how Rey categorizes most things actually: _as a result of Kylo)._ Poe had been telling her a story, something about an accident from his childhood that had left him with a permanently gimpy left arm. He’d gestured to show her, his bare fingers brushing up against the exposed skin of her shoulder, and the picture had unfolded behind her eyes like a dream sequence, a tragic future beyond her control.

“What is it?” Poe’s brown eyes squinted at her warmly, in a display of concern rather than accusation. “Do you not like the tiramisu? Because I’ll help you eat it, if that’s the case. Really, it’s no problem. My services are free of charge … well mostly.”

He was funny. Nice. Rey didn’t really know him yet, but she already felt from that very first vision that he was _good_. Later, as winter in New York City melted into spring, bringing with it a trail of slush and sporadic snowstorms that refused to abate, she realized that he was thoughtful too. She spent a lot of time at his apartment in Brooklyn, off Franklin Avenue, and woke up to find post-it notes left in places where he clearly knew she’d find them: stuck next to the kitchen sink, taped to the bathroom mirror above a haze of condensation. 

_Knock ‘em dead in your presentation today, killer. Can’t wait to hear how it goes._

_Did you know that your freckles do this adorable thing where they scrunch up when you smile? I wanted to alert you to this glorious phenomenon on the off chance that you weren’t aware of it. Well, I am. I’ve been thinking about it all morning. Yeah, your freckles have that kind of effect on me. I really don’t know what to do about it._

And one day in May, when the city was awash in green rain:

_I think I might love you._

“Actually, I know so,” Poe corrected himself, opening his eyes as Rey kissed him awake. He was adorable when drowsy, with his dark hair tousled and his skin still sticky with the sheen of dreams, his eyes patterned with a sleepy patina. When Rey kissed him, he pulled her into him, his body instinctively curling around her warmth. 

His hands slid to cup her waist. She shuddered against the weight of him, closed her eyes, and gave into the way his mouth made her feel.

———

In her novel, _The Blind Assassin_ , Margaret Atwood writes, _the best way to keep a secret is to pretend there isn’t one_. George Orwell says the exact same thing, in his book, _1984 — if you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself._

This is what Rey does — she doesn’t lie to Poe; she lies to herself. Tells herself that she doesn’t think about Kylo, not ever. Doesn’t think about that day spent together in the office bar, months ago now. Some interactions don’t ever look like much of anything. You can slide them under a microscope and study them clinically, examining the gradual, messy build up of human connection. But Kylo and Rey possess something visible even to the untrained eye, no microscope needed. 

Here is what Rey tells herself: that she doesn’t feel any particular way about Kylo. He is her work superior; they have a professional relationship, and she respects him. 

Here is the secret: that Kylo exists in the back of her mind, even as she lies next to Poe in bed and curls into his arms. The secret is that she thinks about the vulpine line of Kylo’s jaw and the broad shouldered leanness of his body, even when she knows she shouldn’t. That she imagines the fierceness with which he would kiss her — the lip-bruising, skin-colliding, bones-smashing, soul-crashing kind of kiss. 

She just _knows_ how it would be. She knows because Kylo emanates the same raw, pulsing vitality that echoes within her, too — but while he wears his emotion far too close to the surface, hers is buried down deep, so hidden away that most people never even see it.

But he does. That’s the point, isn’t it? 

_Would you tell me about yourself?_

He _sees_ her.

———

Monday morning, and Kylo is horrifically hungover, his head a cocktail of pounding pain. The office is full of bright, white light, amplifying the pulsing static behind his eyes. Everything aches, pulsing in tandem with the dull, rhythmic beat of his heart. 

His uncle Luke had texted again last night. _Kylo, it’s been ten years. Do you think we’re ever going to get past this?_

Kylo doesn’t bother responding because he doesn’t know. Do people ever truly get over past traumas? Or do they just wait for the scar tissue to form and learn new coping mechanisms to face the world? If there really exists a way to erase an incident from your psyche, then everyone would want to try it, _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ -esque. Fuck, he’d be the first to sign up.

He’s in such a foul mood that he snaps at Amilyn over something stupid and reduces Rose Tico to tears when she comes into his office with a creative proposal for a new client. Normally, he’d apologize, but today he’s too angry to care.

_The night is starless and black, but the road is blacker still. He is following it, tracing that great gash in the land, because it's the only thing black enough to be seen, even in the darkness. He can hear the shouting behind him, a cacophony of voices screaming that they’ll find him, that they'll end him — he just keeps his eyes on the road. It is tar-black, pitch black, black like the bowels of hell, black like the inside of his own body, before they’d tried to turn it inside out. The blood has congealed and matted on his face. It's flaked even in his eyelashes; he can feel dry beads of it shudder when he blinks. His throat burns like fire. He keeps walking._

The soft knock on the door startles him from introspective thoughts, rips him right out of the horrific memories.

“Come in.”

Kylo looks up to see Rey Kenobi sidle through the wood paneled doors. Her hair is pulled into a complicated machination of braids, tendrils falling free to frame her face. She’s wearing black jeans with holes in the knees and a fitted green T-shirt. Her fingernails are painted a dark maroon; her wrists are bare of jewelry. There is absolutely nothing pretentious about her. She is a girl stripped bare. _A girl_ , Kylo has to remind himself, _just a girl_. He must be, what, ten years her senior? At least. He hates himself for the way his pulse jumps into his throat at the sight of her.

“What is it?”

She sits down without invitation. He can’t look directly at her, so he focuses on his desk instead. _Not now_ , he thinks, _I can’t deal with you when I feel this … fragile. Like glass, like she can see through him. Like he’ll shatter into a thousand pieces if dropped._

“You made my friend cry,” she says, without preamble. 

Kylo sifts idly through a stack of papers that don’t need to be sifted. “You should tell her to toughen up.”

She arches back in the chair, her chest rising with breath. He braces himself for a rebuke, but instead she only asks, “Are you OK today?”

It pierces through his self pitying fog, latching like a burr onto the soft, vulnerable space underneath his collarbone. It’s only three words, but it’s the way she’s looking at him — head cocked, eyes narrowed, mouth pursed — that makes him want to give everything up to her. The concern on her face is so thick and obvious, it looks like it’s been slicked on as a layer of oil. He wants to tell her about the awfulness of his past, how a simple text from his uncle Luke brings it all rushing back, how he dreams about it still, screaming himself awake from nightmares so deep and dark that he thinks he’s already dead. 

But he swallows hard. Makes a superhuman effort to sweep up the mess of his emotions and stash his black rage about _everything that happened_ deep in the back of his mind, where he can parse through it later. Later, when Rey isn’t staring at him with glacier-melting eyes. 

“Yeah,” he says, his voice scratchy. He should probably chastise her for the abject inappropriateness of this encounter. It was inappropriate for her to comment that he’d made Rose cry; it was inappropriate of her to ask _are you OK_. But Kylo’s never been good with boundaries. He clears his throat. “I’m just under a lot of pressure to come up with creative ideas for this new Comcast opportunity. There’s a lot of money on the table. And just … writers’ block or whatever, I guess.”

It’s a lie, but only sort of. The best lies have at least a little bit of truth to them. 

“Oh,” Rey says. She pauses for a half second, sinking her teeth into her bottom lip. Kylo is transfixed by the soft pop of skin. “This is probably weird for me to say, but …”

“Say it.”

“Do you know Bukowski?”

“Bukowski?” Kylo bites back the surprise. Sometimes, he wonders why he thinks about Rey so much. Why he looks towards her desk first thing every morning and lies in bed sometimes, speculating whether there’s anyone in her life she’s fucking regularly. She’s beautiful, but so are a million other girls. There’s fire in her face, but it’s more than that. It’s the fact that anytime she opens her mouth, she absolutely _inflames_ him with curiosity. He wants to know more about her. He wants to know how she grew up, who first broke her heart, about the memories behind her nightmares, about the things that make her feel most alive. Yeah, he’s not one to lecture about boundaries.

“Mmm yeah, the writer,” Rey says. When she leans in, Kylo feels something seize up in his chest. His breath has no body left in it, just rapid-fire filaments of air. “He was broke and he’d get into these bar fights and he was horribly misogynistic — but I think his writing resonates with people because of how raw it is. How human it is. Anyway, he wrote this poem called _air and light and time and space_. It’s about an artist who’s looking to simplify his life, so he gets rid of the distractions around him and buys this beautiful studio with great light that he feels will finally allow him to create. But the thing is, art doesn’t really work that way. For those people that truly want to create things, that are born artists — they’ll create no matter the circumstances. They can’t _not_ do it. Take J.K Rowling for instance, scribbling the beginnings of Harry Potter on the backs of napkins as a struggling waitress and single mother. Take every single person who’s ever worked a day job and then gone home and played their guitar or written a story or painted a picture. Passion exists despite —and sometimes in spite of — obstacles. And so you see, the studio isn’t really a studio. It’s a symbol of preparedness. No one is ever truly prepared to create. There is no ideal time or ideal condition in which to create. You just have to do it.” 

She lays her hand, with its ragged, nail-bitten cuticles flat on his desk. 

“And are you a writer too?” Kylo grounds out. His voice is harsh and gritty, like it’s been sanded over roughly, or threaded through with gravel.

“Yeah,” Rey says, her face bypassing incandescent and suddenly going supernova. To Kylo, she looks like a work of impressionism, something full of colors and feeling, designed for the sole purpose of eliciting emotion from the viewer. The column of her throat, when she swallows, is magnetic. Kylo wants to put his mouth to the place, to bite a circle of marks into the soft surface of her skin, to signify that she’s _his_. 

He leans in. _Fuck boundaries. Fuck rules_. And god help him, she leans in too, flicking her dilated pupils up to his, her mouth parted slightly, looking at him like she wants him as much as he wants her. For a second, he lets his thumbs barely brush the pads of her cheekbones. Her skin is so soft underneath his fingertips. He exhales a messy, tangled breath. _Another day_ , he thinks, a little bit desperately. There’ll be another day where he can do what he wants to her. Because right now he wants to slam her into the wall with all the force that his lust warrants, mark her up from the neck down, fuck her with her clothes barely off, with his mouth next to her ear, whispering filthy things, watching as her mouth fills with his name. 

He’s achingly hard. And forcing himself not to move is like ripping the roof off his mouth with scalding liquid, but he does it anyway. Because he doesn’t want to scare her. And because, somehow, this is _enough_ for him — his fingers on her face, the barest of intimate brushes. 

Rey moves suddenly. Rips her body from the chair, tears her face away from his. Her eyes are wide, not with lust this time, but full of something else. Fear. “I - I - I have to go,” she says. 

“Wait—” Kylo calls after her, half-rising from the chair, but she’s already slamming the door behind her.

———

“I love you for talking to Kylo for me,” Rose says from where she’s loitering at Rey’s desk, “but judging from your face, I’m guessing it didn’t go well?”

“What?” Rey snaps, totally distracted. _Had she really talked to Kylo about Bukowski’s air and light and time and space?_ That’s how her whole body feels now: dizzy, light. Utterly abandoned by gravity. _Kyo’s fingers on her face._ Fuck, she wants to carve that memory into a special cavity in her skull, where she can pull it out later and relish it properly. 

“Was Kylo an asshole to you too?” Rose is sympathetic, her face still shiny with half-dried tear tracks. “Don’t worry about it. He has these awful mood swings. I’m sure he’ll be nicer tomorrow. Or if not, maybe it’s worth bringing up with HR.” She throws a black expression towards his still-closed office door.

Rey looks too. What had she expected, that he’d run after her? _Wait —_

She’d wanted him more than she’d ever wanted any man in her life, ever. Including Poe. Her whole body still pounds with the wanting. And then she’d ruined everything. But she’d never seen anything play out in her head like she’d had when Kylo touched her. 

When his fingers came into contact with her face, the same picture had bloomed behind her eyes, saturated with desperation: _Kylo, on his knees, the gun to his head, calling out her name._ But then it had shifted. Spun, like a dice skidding across a smooth surface, dragging a whirl of colors and shapes with it. When the picture solidified, _she_ was there next to Kylo, kicking the gun away from his head, grasping for his hand, screaming _run, follow me_. His eyes were black holes in his face when he’d reached up for her fingers and followed her.

Rey had been seeing death ever since she was born. She just never thought she could do anything to change the inevitable.

Until now.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Nikkita Gill's _Monsters_ :
> 
> "The monsters were never under my bed  
> Because the monsters were inside my head.
> 
> I fear no monsters  
> for no monsters I see.  
> Because all this time,  
> the monster has been me."


End file.
